Birthers and the black middle class

The original title of this post was “Do we live in a post-racial society?”

This video by Baratunde Thurston is all over the Internet.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a black professional person, and have to listen to Donald Trump and all the other malicious fools who have questioned President Obama’s birthright citizenship.  It means that, if you are black, you will always have to be on the defensive, no matter how high a station you attain in life, or what you achieve.

You can be the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation, like Ursula Burns of Xerox Corp., and there will be broadcasters who will say you appointment to a Presidential Commission is an “affirmative action hire.”  You can be a respected scholar like Henry Louis Gates of Harvard, and a police officer can enter your home, insult you and engineer your arrest on trumped-up charges if you talk back.

Donald Trump’s questioning of President Obama’s birth certificate has been shown to be nonsense to anybody with a remnant of sanity.  But Trump, who evidently is without shame, is now raising the issue of whether he got into Harvard by means of affirmative action.  He of course has no evidence of any of this.  He is just raising questions, and, no matter how little basis there is for the questions, there will be people who take them seriously.

He is like the people of an earlier era who said that Frederick Douglass and Phyllis Wheatley couldn’t possibly have written the books that appeared under their name, that some white person must have written them instead.

I remember once, when I worked for the Democrat and Chronicle, I was assigned to write a feature article on what kind of Christmas presents adults were buying for their children that year.

One of the places I went was a computer game store, where I saw a well-dressed black man.  As I walked toward him I saw a look of acute distress, a kind of here-we-go-again look.  It didn’t take much insight for me to realize he must have had a lot of bad experiences with store managers and detectives.  I will always remember how pleased and relieved he looked when I identified myself as a newspaper reporter, and began to ask my questions.

As I say, I can’t imagine what it is like to be in that situation – to always have to be on guard, to always think you are being judged by hostile eyes.

This is not a phobia.  Racial discrimination against black people is a thing of the present, not just the past.  Black and white teams of testers in New York City that half the time employers will take a white man with a criminal record over an equally qualified black man with a clean record.  Other testers have shown that employers will chose someone with a standard white American name over someone with a typical African American name.  Other testers shown discrimination in lending.

I am not talking here about the legacy of slavery and segregation, although these things do affect the present.  I am not talking about socioeconomic factors or culture, although those things also matter.   I am talking about prejudice and discrimination in the here and now against black people based solely on their race.

Click on Baratunde.com for the story of how the video was made.

Click on The Longest War for the comment of Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic.

In point of fact, every black parent I know is at war with their children in a way that white parents are not. I grew up in house where the history of race and racism was the air. But concurrent to that history was the deeply-held belief that American racism was never an excuse for cynicism, anti-intellectualism, thuggism or nihilism. My parents were [race] conscious. But when I was failing my way through school, I don’t recall them ever raising their clenched fists and exclaiming “Damn the white man.”

To the contrary, there was a deep-seated belief that educating yourself was essential, and that hard work ultimately prevails. Whatever their broader critiques, it was that essential faith that united them with the rest of the country. Preaching that faith is a lot easier when you have actual examples to point to. In terms of external examples (outside of the family) there are no better models, right now, than Barack and Michelle Obama. … … 

From the perspective of race, we [African-Americans] don’t object to people trying to defeat Obama. We don’t object to Hillary claiming he’s soft. We don’t object to McCain claiming he’s a celebrity. We don’t object to the GOP calling him a tax and spend liberal. We don’t even object to Mitt Romney aspiring to hang him. (We know what you meant, Mitt.)

But when broad sections of this country foolishly follow a carnival barker in the ugly tradition of attacking black citizenship rights, when pundits shriek  that Obama’s successes are simply the result of the misguided largess of white people, they undermine our most intimate war. They undermine the notion that someone familiar to that kid on the corner could legitimately reach the highest levels of the country, that someone like that kid’s Aunt could be the First Lady. They undermine this country’s social contract, and the “hard work pays” message of my parents. And to that we object.

For if they will not take as legitimate a magna cum laude from their highest institutions, if they will not accept a man who tells black kids to cut off the video games and study, who accedes to their absurd requests one week, and slays their demons the next, who will they accept? Who among us would they ever believe?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Click on Black Privilege for more from Ta-Nehisi Coates. [Added 5/7/11]

Now, if you are a white person who thinks everything black people have got is the fruit of affirmative action, consider this.

In 2001, a pair of black men and a pair of white men went hunting for work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Each was 23 years old, a local college student, bright and articulate.  They looked alike and dressed alike, had identical educational backgrounds and remarkably similar past work experience.  From June to December, they combed the Sunday classified pages in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and searched a state-run job site called “Jobnet,” applying for the same entry-level jobs as waiters, delivery-truck drivers, cooks, and cashiers.  There was one obvious difference in each pair: one man was a former criminal and the other was not.

If this sounds like an experiment, that’s because it was.  Watching the explosive growth of the criminal justice system, fueled largely by ill-conceived “tough on crime” policies, sociologist Devah Pager took a novel approach to how prison affected ever growing numbers of Americans after they’d done their time—a process all but ignored by politicians and the judicial system.

So Pager sent those two young black men and two young white men out into the world to apply for perfectly real jobs.  Then she recorded who got callbacks and who didn’t.  She soon discovered that a criminal history caused a massive drop-off in employer responses—not entirely surprising.  But when Pager started separating out black applicants from white ones, she stumbled across the real news in her study, a discovery that shook our understanding of racial inequality and jobs to the core.

Pager’s white applicant without a criminal record had a 34 percent callback rate. That promptly sunk to 17 percent for her white applicant with a criminal record. The figures for black applicants were 14 percent and 5 percent.  And yes, you read that right: in Pager’s experiment, white job applicants with a criminal history got more callbacks than black applicants without one.  “I expected to find an effect with a criminal record and some with race,” Pager says. “I certainly was not expecting that result, and it was quite a surprise.”

Pager ran a larger version of this experiment in New York City in 2004, sending teams of young, educated, and identically credentialed men out into the Big Apple’s sprawling market for entry-level jobs—once again, with one applicant posing as an ex-con, the other with a clean record.  (As she did in Milwaukee, Pager had the teams alternate who posed as the ex-con.)  The results? Again Pager’s African-American applicants received fewer callbacks and job offers than the whites. The disparity was particularly striking for ex-criminals: a drop off of 9 percentage points for whites, but 15 percentage points for blacks.  “Employers already reluctant to hire blacks,” Pager wrote, “appear particularly wary of blacks with known criminal histories.

Other research has supported her findings.  A 2001-2002 field experiment by academics from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, uncovered a sizeable gap in employer callbacks for job applicants with white-sounding names (Emily and Greg) versus black-sounding names (Lakisha and Jamal).  They also found that the benefits of a better resume were 30% greater for whites than blacks.

via  Mother Jones. [Added 7/5/11]

Click on White ex-cons get jobs faster than Blacks with no criminal record for a report on the experience of black and white job applicants in New York City.

Click on Study shows racial discrimination for evidence that people with typically white first names get hired faster than people with typically black first names.

Click on Overcoming Racial Discrimination for other studies of racial discrimination (scroll down for studies using paired black and white testers).

Click on Racial Discrimination in the U.S.: Evidence from the 2000 HUD Study for evidence of racial discrimination in housing using testers [Added 5/7/11]

Tags: Barack Obama, Birthers, Black professional people, Donald Trump, Racial Discrimination, Racism